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Sunday, 06 June 2010

Brian Duffy 1933-2010

Regular readers will recall our posts about Brian Duffy, one of the three leading lights of 1960s photography in Britain who later simply walked away from it all. We really only pointed to the excellent BBC video about him online, and our doing so was notable only because, as the photographer's son Chris Duffy later put it, we "pointed gazillions of people to the documentary" and crashed their server.

The video is still there (with more robust hosting)—to get to it you go to the Duffy website > Exhibits & Links > Play Documentary—and is still well worth seeing, if you haven't. But Duffy himself succumbed to lung disease last Monday.

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Comments

What sad news. Here's a direct link to the documentary http://vimeo.com/9141202 which I saw on BBC Four recently and is absolutely beautiful. What struck me most about it was a scene in which he photographs the model Joanna Lumely again after so many years. His son set up the camera which Duffy wasn't particularly interested in, but Duffy looked at Lumely with an unbelievable intensity while he was taking the photograph. You could simply see by looking at him that all his focus was concentrated in his eyes at that moment. A lesson for all photographers, I think.